In honor Maurice Sendak I will be picking my top ten quotes from children’s books.

“And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.” – Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are)

“Words can be worrisome, people complex, motives and manners unclear, grant her the wisdom to choose her path right, free from unkindness and fear.” – Neil Gaiman (Blueberry Girl)

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” – Dr. Seuss (I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!)

“Once I spoke the language of the flowers,
Once I understood each word the caterpillar said,
Once I smiled in secret at the gossip of the starlings,
And shared a conversation with the housefly
in my bed.
Once I heard and answered all the questions
of the crickets,
And joined the crying of each falling dying
flake of snow,
Once I spoke the language of the flowers. . . .
How did it go?
How did it go?” – Shel Silverstein (Where the Sidewalk Ends)

“Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit.’Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,’ he asked, ‘or bit by bit?’
‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” – Margery Williams Bianco (The Velveteen Rabbit)

“Prince Ronald said, Elizabeth, your hair is all dirty. You are wearing an ugly paper bag. You don’t have any shoes on and you smell like a dragon’s ear. Come back and rescue me when you’re dressed like a real princess.
Elizabeth said, Ronald, your hair is all nice. Your clothes are all pretty. You look like a nice guy, but guess what? You are a bum.
They didn’t get married after all.” – Robert N. Munsch (The PaperBag Princess)

“If you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you – you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing was ever going to happen again.” – C.S. Lewis (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe)

“He saw clearly how plain and simple – how narrow, even – it all was; but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one’s existence. He did not at all want to abandon the new life and its splendid spaces, to turn his back on sun and air and all they offered him and creep home and stay there; the upper world was all too strong, it called to him still, even down there, and he knew he must return to the larger stage. But it was good to think he had this to come back to, this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.” – Kenneth Grahame (The Wind in the Willows)